The trade body, the US Business and Industry Council, concluded that this record trade deficit ‘should put to rest widespread claims by the president and others that American manufacturing is in renaissance mode’. In a more recent study, Alan Tonelson, one of the council’s research fellows, reported that imports in 2011 captured a record share of US markets even for advanced manufactured goods, ranging from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to ball bearings to machine tools and dozens of other capital- and technology-intensive sectors. And this is an area where the US is supposed to hold a relative competitive strength because of its higher levels of R&D and technology.